Zomato launches rewards feature Piggybank on its food delivery service

Restaurant listing and food delivery company Zomato has launched a loyalty reward points program called Piggybank for ordering food via the platform.

How is it going to work? Every time you order food online on Zomato, 10% of your order value will be credited back as Z Coins into your Zomato Piggybank. Using these points, you can pay 10% of the value of the next order. You even earn Z Coins in your Piggybank when you use Piggybank coins in a particular order. ( 1 Z coin = Re 1). The feature works even when you are already availing some other offer of Zomato.

The company is currently rolling out the new feature to a select number of users in 21 cities– where it has food delivery services–based on their loyalty and geographic availability of partner restaurants (which is about 10,000 users as of now on its Android app).

The company added that within a week or two, as it will ramp up its partner network on Piggybank, and will extend this membership program to all food ordering users who place more than 5 orders a month regularly. Users who are not a part of the launch invitation list can get access to Piggybank on the basis of referral code by someone who already has Piggybank.

It going to be a paid feature: Zomato said that it will be converting this programme into a paid subscription program at Rs 299 per year (Zomato’s blog say this is inspired by Amazon Prime) after two months. This is when referrals will not be needed and users will be able to buy the Piggybank feature.

New revenue stream

A new subscription programme is an interesting approach the company has taken to monetize its food delivery services. Zomato launched its online ordering and food delivery services in May 2015 and currently delivers over 10.5 Million orders a month. Zomato said food ordering brought in nearly 30% of Zomato’s revenue in FY18, with the share increasing from close to 18% in FY17. In March 2018, food delivery in India grew by 48% in terms of order volume over the previous month and revenue-wise by 55%. In terms of usage, the company said it had nearly 5.5 million monthly food orders in March 2018.

Zomato’s food delivery biz and feature development

Zomato recently appointed former MakeMyTrip as the Chief Operating Officer – Online, Mohit Gupta, as the CEO of the Zomato’s food delivery business. The company want to have an edge against its competitor Swiggy, which recently raised Series G funding of $210 million led by existing investor Naspers and new investor DST Global, along with others to ramp up its supply chain network, to expand to new markets, technology and branding. In last week of June, Zomato added an option to add a tip for the delivery person. The company said that the tip feature allows users to add a small tip between Rs 10 to Rs 50 to the order which is directly transferred to the delivery executive without any deductions by Zomato. This feature appears during the final stage of placing an order on the same page as customer information, order cart. Besides that, it has features like faster delivery for special cases like sickness, giving instructions for the restaurant to not send plastic cutlery, or mentioning special food requirements and allergies.